As an old advertising campaign used to say, "I never knew there was so much in it..." Except that FSFF always did know this about BLFJ, a truly brilliant repository of incredibly lively, scrupulously edited, and highly informative online film writing....

Our Orgasms, Ourselves: Meditations on Movie Sex, By Marilyn Papayanis “How can it be that the act that socially and historically has defined masculinity and to which, to a significant extent, male self-esteem is ultimately linked is not reliably rewarding to women?” — Rachel P. Maines

Notions of Gender in Hindi Cinema: The Passive Indian Woman in the Global Discourse of Consumption, By Prakash Kona “During the so-called ‘repressive’ ages sex was a joy, because it was practiced in secret and it made a mockery of all of the obligations and duties that the repressive power imposed. Instead, in tolerant societies, as the one we live in is declared to be, sex produces neuroses because the freedom granted is false and above all, it is granted from above and not won from below.” — Pier Paolo Pasolini, Pasolini prossimo nostro (2006)

Slash and Burn: Revisiting William Friedkin’s The Hunted (2003), By Ian Murphy “Putting the pain back into violence is Friedkin’s real achievement in The Hunted, and indeed his unfashionable, irony-free approach helps explain why the film never found its audience in a decade where torture porn induced new depths of numbness in viewers.”

Who Took the Folk Out of Music? Everybody, It Seems, By Norman Ball “How does Tibet’s cultural destruction differ, in essence, from Time-Warner’s choreographed glamorization of bitches and ho’s in inner-city America, or death metal’s hold over disenfranchised Midwestern youth?”

Deborah Kerr: An Actress in Search of an Author, By Penelope Andrew “The camera goes right through the skin. The camera brings out what you are, and in her case, there was always a kind of a humanity that she had in all of the things that she played . . . I think she made movies that have never worn off their splendor.” — Peter Viertel, Kerr’s husband

The Complete Exile: The Films of Carlos Atanes, By Rob Smart “These shoestring-budget shot-on-video works already demonstrate Atanes’ characteristic gifts for composition and staging combined with a knack for finding bleakly evocative locations that reinforce his themes of power, oppression, exile or, entrapment and the dream of alternate realities where freedom might be possible.”

Between Heaven and Hell: Martin Scorsese’s Middle Ground, By Joanne De Simone “Together with his unobstructed panorama of those mean streets, and his long relationship with religion, Scorsese’s character was shaped. It infused in him just the right amount of guilt to develop stories about the struggle between good and evil and that dangerous place in between — not bad enough for hell, not good enough for heaven.”

Welcome to Film Studies For Free

Founded in 2008, FSFFis lovingly tended (in a personal capacity) by Catherine Grant, Professor of Digital Media and Screen Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. She always wanted to be a Borgesian librarianwhen she grew up.